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NIDCD Grantee Receives NIH Director's Pioneer Award

October 3, 2005

Dr. Erich D. Jarvis, Ph.D., an NIDCD grantee, is among 13 recipients of the 2005 NIH Director's Pioneer Award. The Pioneer Award Program supports scientists of exceptional creativity who propose highly innovative approaches to major contemporary challenges in biomedical research. Dr. Jarvis, an associate professor in the Department of Neurobiology at Duke University Medical Center, combines molecular, behavioral, electrophysiological, and computational tools to decipher vocal learning, using songbirds as a model system. He plans to use his Pioneer Award to test a hypothesis about the genetic machinery underlying vocal learning that could pave the way for repairing vocalization disorders in humans.

Erich D. Jarvis, Ph.D.

Erich D. Jarvis, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Neurobiology at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, NC. He received a Ph.D. in molecular neurobiology and animal behavior from The Rockefeller University in 1995. Jarvis combines molecular, behavioral, electrophysiological, and computational tools to decipher vocal learning, using songbirds as a model system. He plans to use his Pioneer Award to test a hypothesis about the genetic machinery underlying vocal learning that could pave the way for repairing vocalization disorders in humans. During his undergraduate training at Hunter College and his graduate education, Jarvis received support from two programs of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences: the Minority Biomedical Research Support program and the Minority Access to Research Careers program. In 2002, he received the Alan T. Waterman Award, the National Science Foundation's highest honor for a young researcher. Jarvis is the subject of a profile on the television program "NOVA scienceNOW" that is scheduled to air on October 18, 2005.